‘Homeland,’ Season 6, Episode 4: A Warning to All Young Men — Avoid Carrie

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Claire Danes, left, in “Homeland”; her character’s daughter, right, is played by Claire and McKenna Keane.CreditCreditJoJo Whilden/Showtime

By Judith Warner

Feb. 12, 2017

So it looks like we’re done with Sekou. Is anyone really surprised?

Young men don’t generally do well after contact with Carrie. And Carrie’s best attempts at living a civilian life, once again, have hit some pretty serious challenges. Her colleague, Reda Hashem, is insisting that no matter how great the thrill of the “win,” her work will heretofore have to be done “legally.”

And that’s no fun.

Her advising/not-advising of President-elect Elizabeth Keane is taking a seriously sinister turn, with Keane and her top aide pressuring Carrie to sell out Dar Adal — and by extension, Saul — by providing some embarrassing intel that will permit them to apply “leverage,” “shut him down” and stop his destructive scheming.

We know that Carrie could never comply with that sort of demand, no matter how nasty Dar may be, and no matter how flattering the president-elect’s pointed reminders that her plans for fixing the C.I.A. are Carrie’s handiwork: “Your reforms, Carrie. Your ideas.” Keane’s promise that, no matter what, Carrie will “never do a day in prison” is so chillingly hollow that it has the ring of a wake-up call, if Carrie is ready to hear it. Which she now may be. Things are always morally ambiguous in Otto Düring-land, dark strains of raw ambition and craven self-promotion lurking just under the good words and righteous sentiments.

Is there a similar, if flipped, moral ambiguity to Dar Adal’s noxious scheming, his threats, and — it appears — his willingness to have Saul detained by the Israelis while he perhaps masterminds the setting-off of a car bomb in midtown Manhattan, all in order to score a geopolitical point? I ask this only because I sensed something other than pure malevolence in his surprise visit to Franny’s preschool. (The man with “painted hair” clearly did not appeal to the child whose own “pretty” locks he admired.)

I sensed something almost protective. Something like genuine concern. Some element of basic loyalty lying behind his obviously false claim to be a “friend, an admirer even.” There seemed to be something not-altogether-unreasonable behind his insistence that her perceptions of the C.I.A. were “frozen in time.” Of course I could be wrong. But if Dar really was behind the placement of the bomb in Sekou’s van —– and I’m not entirely convinced that he was — he didn’t set it off on the 59th Street bridge, which would have been far more spectacular and deadly, and he didn’t set it off at the heart of rush hour. It was more like, well, a drone strike. We’ll see the fallout next week.

I can’t tell you how pleased I was tonight to see the return of Majid Javadi, the fastidious and ferocious butcher of Season 3, who became a C.I.A. plant in Tehran after Carrie and Saul threatened to make his history of embezzlement known to the Iranian government. I hope he’ll stick around. Javadi and Saul, you may recall, have a history of friendship and betrayal that dates back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He told Carrie that Brody was not behind the Langley bombing, and that the real perpetrator was still at large. Which means that Carrie and Saul — and we — are not done with him. Or so I hope.

I’m very glad too for the return of Etai Luskin, albeit in a less grandfatherly incarnation than when we last encountered him in Berlin. He’s scary now, a master of simmering understatement: “What a treat. Saul coming to visit you at long last … Your flight was canceled. Mechanical problems.”

“I don’t like being lied to, especially by my friends,” he tells Saul, who instantly retorts “You’re in the wrong business.”

Is Etai today the same man who presided over a cozy Passover back in Season 5’s Berlin? Perhaps not — perhaps because, like Quinn, he has since been visited by visions of a “flash of light.” Only in his case, the light signals his country’s possible nuclear annihilation.

And what of Quinn? He’s getting better, despite the disaster of a haircut, and the indignity of being saddled with a Volvo station wagon for running surveillance through the New York City streets. Is it addled Quinn, or clever Quinn who brays, “My bad” to what may or may not be an officer of the N.Y.P.D.?

Either way, it’s satisfying to know that, even with the unsteady gait, the halting speech, and the fumbling spycraft, Quinn still has what it takes to tie all the strands of this previously lumbering season’s plot together so that they soon can be delivered up to Carrie.